I had a close call with my one year old yellow lab today. I took him out to Cottage lake with my wife and kids for an afternoon swim and to start training him in my Marsh Rat. Before I got him into the boat, I decided to burn off some of his energy with a few bumper retrieves. On the first throw, he made it about half way to the bumper and then caught sight of a few ducks over near the dock that some lady was feeding. Off he goes full speed after the ducks and of course the stupid ducks did not fly away, but rather tried to out swim him. After about five minutes of trying to call him off the ducks, with no success, one of them decides to head for the middle of the lake with him hot on it's heals. I did not have the e-collar on him and he was refusing to listen to my recall whistle and commands. He has an insane bird drive and I have had challenges pulling him of birds in the past. The e-collar usually does the trick, but this time he was hell bent on chasing the bird down. By now he has been swimming full out for about 10 minutes and is out in the middle of the lake. I was pretty concerned about him drowning out there so I hopped into the Marsh Rat and paddled out to "retrieve my retriever". I got him into the boat without any problem, but it was pretty scary.
I've worked very hard on recall with him and he perfroms perfect as long as there are no birds around. The last thing I want to do is break his bird drive by over correcting him in these cases and I'd really like to know if any other people have had similar challenges with their retrievers. I am tempted to take him over to one of the game farms I visit near Ellensburg and spend some time in an open field with a few wing clipped Chukar to see if I can get him to recall off of running birds he can both see and smell. I just really don't want to make a mistake and break his drive.
Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
SD
